There is a point in every young person's life when you realize that the youth that you've progressed through and graduate to some sort of adulthood is equally as messed up as where you're going.
When I was writing 'Kitchen Confidential,' I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.
You can't be afraid to not have everything figured out. There's too much pressure on young people today to have it all figured out when they're in college.
It's definitely a shock to go from being 15 in high school to working. There's no real cushion there. There's no preparation at all. You learn by doing.
Normal adult shopping is something I will never actually do, because it's no more possible for me to go shopping like normal adults do than it is for a man with no legs to wake up one day and walk. I can't miss shopping like you'd miss things you once had. I miss it in a different way. I miss it like you would miss a train.
Most people are really fighting to not be adults. And, when it happens, it's a big transition. And a lot of that is just awful. It's awful to have to get a job and really be responsible for other people. And it is funny, too. Like, we're all kind of little idiot kids trying to act like we know what we are doing.
This is a shameful thing to say, but I've never really got that 'grown-up' mind-set. I have to buy forks? Why?
People think living in your parents' basement until you're twenty-nine is lame. But what they don't realize is that while you're there, you save money on rent, food, and dates.
Welcome to adulthood," she said. "It sucks as much as high school.
I spent so much of my younger life drinking, and being drunk makes learning to be a grown-up kind of hard.
I could barely function as an adult; I slept through alarm clocks and lost train tickets mid-journey.
Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.
Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
I don't know anybody who doesn't have a lost decade.
All the young people grow up too fast and want to be able to do this, or that. When you get to the older age and you have a mortgage, bills, this and that you think: "If I had done that differently when I was younger, then I wouldn't be in this situation now."
I think the 20s are a vastly overrated decade. We promise kids that once they get out of school, life will begin and their dreams will come true. But then comes the struggle.
I'm 25 and just trying to understand women. Obviously, that is a process that never ends.
You don't really grow up until you quit playing sports.
I'm definitely an indoor kid who's turned into an inside person.
I think your 20s are the hardest part of life. I mean, everyone goes on about how hard it is to be a teenager, but actually I think it's tougher to be in your 20s because you're expected to be a grownup and expected to earn your own living and be successful and I think you feel like a kid still.
I mean, I - it's so funny, I am, you know, I am, you know, a working woman out in the world, but I still live with my parents half the time. I've been sort of taking this very long, stuttering period of moving out.
I think that a lot of teenagers think they got it all down-pat. Especially when they first move out and they're on their own for the first time. Oh this is easy, this is breezy. Then all of a sudden it hits you in your mid-twenties that maybe you don't know how to do your taxes still. There's all kinds of things and you start calling your parents up again.
There's no such thing as a grown up person.
I used to be good at clothes shopping and whatnot - at least, I think I was! - but at some point after two kids and a career that worked out better than I ever could have imagined, I looked up from my desk and realized that I wore the same three t-shirts and 15-year-old jeans every day.
But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.
